Taiwan Semiconductor Update Is a Positive for These Holdings

Now that we’ve scooped up some additional shares of Marvell (MRVL) , let’s recap some other developments between Tuesday night and Wednesday morning as we wait for the Fed's policy decision later on Wednesday.

November Sales at Taiwan Semiconductor

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing (TSM) reported that its November sales soared 24.5% year-over-year to about NT$343.61 billion but fell 6.5% compared to October.

Here’s the thing: In the last few years, when the smartphone market was the largest end market at TSM, we would typically see a larger drop-off between October and November. In 2024, the sequential fall was 12% and in 2023 it was 15%. Working the production of smartphone units for the holiday shopping season backward, we tend to see corresponding chip demand move lower in the back half of the December quarter, ahead of the typical seasonal decline in demand between the December quarter and the coming March one.

We see the smaller sequential decline of 6% this year, combined with the year-over-year strength signaling demand at TSM’s High Performance Computing segment, the one that houses AI and data center chips, remained strong.

We see that as a nice positive for our shares of Nvidia (NVDA) and Marvell, and one that should help set an upbeat outlook when Marvell and other holdings make the investment conference rounds later on Wednesday and on Thursday.

Portfolio Conference Presentations

In addition to Marvell presenting on Wednesday at the 23^rd Annual Barclays Technology conference, we also have Bank of America (BAC) delivering a presentation on Wednesday at 3 p.m. ET at the Goldman Sachs Financial Services Conference.

On Thursday, we have three more holdings – Axon (AXON) , Microsoft (MSFT) and Arista Networks (ANET) — presenting at the second day of the Barclays conference.

More Pro Portfolio

At the time of publication, TheStreet Pro Portfolio was long MRVL, NVDA, BAC, AXON, MSFT and ANET.